"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 16 October 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

They Make Your Feet Feel Fine

In the summer of 1967, Marshall
McLuhan and co-visionary George B.
Leonard saw clearly into the "future of sex," and
set out to explain the thing to the readers of
Look magazine. "Sex," McLuhan and the other
guy pointed out, "is becoming secondary to the
young." And the same factors causing teenagers to lose
interest in getting naked meant that "the divorce rate
will probably fall," while marriage "may become the
future's most stable institution." And homosexuality
would, of course, soon "fade
out." ("There is a striking absence of it among
the communal-living young people of today.") They had
evidence, too: The Beatles. Who had total, like,
girl haircuts, and yet look how popular they
were with actual girls!

Sex survived, except apparently in certain parts of
Georgia and anywhere in the vicinity of the
editorial staff at Nerve. Of course,
we'll never know what would have happened if the
Beatles hadn't broken up. We can only turn to the next
question, and try to trace the prophet of Toronto's
other social premonitions. Luckily for us, two of
this year's better-reviewed books have already begun
the inquest. Go ahead and guess: Social intercourse, like sexual
intercourse before it, is becoming secondary to the
young, and large portions of it are destined to fade
out.

First a starting point from which the slow decline can
lead to the long serious fall. Wharton
School fellow and Beyond Beef author
Jeremy
Rifkin recently discovered that
people have been concerned about the whole work, food,
and shelter thing for quite a long time. "The
nagging question of who should control the means
of production and determine how the fruits of
labor should be allocated," Rifkin writes in his book
The Age of Access, "has shaped the political
agenda for more than 300 years." And it turns out that
this nagging question isn't even resolved yet. Rifkin
is deeply concerned about the way the
means-of-production/fruits-of-labor problem is
pitching and yawing as culture is caressed and
subsumed by commerce  did you know that social
activity now costs
money?
 but he has a solution:

Only by making local culture a coherent, self-aware
political force will we be able to reestablish its
critical role in the scheme of human society. Tens of
thousands of strong geographic-based
human communities, knit together internally by embedded social
relationships and connected with one another
externally by a shared sense of the importance of
sustaining cultural diversity, represent a powerful
social vision as well as an antidote to the politics
of global
commercial networks operating in cyberspace.

Got it? Well, okay then: Get cracking. (And remember:
They have to be human communities, or it
doesn't count.)

There's plenty of that kind of thing to go around,
too; Rifkin has hidden a couple dozen interesting and
valuable pages inside what appears to be the
transcript of one of Noam Chomsky's dinner
conversations with a group of heavily sedated
autodidacts. Nike, he explains at one point, is now
primarily a marketing concern; they've farmed out the
job of actually making shoes to sweat shops in the
Third World that employ "girls as young as 13," who
are sometimes molested and generally paid as little as
"$1.60 to $2.25 in wages a day, less than it costs to
provide three basic meals." Now we've heard George
W. Bush making nice comments about these "Third World"
people, so we're pretty sure they're charming; but when
Rifkin summons readers into the parlor to unravel the
mystery, his case looks pretty shaky. The real problem,
he says, is that "the deplorable working conditions in outsourcing
plants are never detected because the corporate supply
networks are closely guarded and kept hidden from the
public." We'll concede that our running-dog media
could stand to report a little more
MAI
news and a little
less
My News. Even so,
it would have taken quite an effort of will, over most of the past decade, for
any individual to avoid hearing at least part of this hidden,
closely guarded and never-detected news about Nike's sweatshops.
It might be more accurate to say the problem is that nobody really
wants to hear about deplorable conditions, least of all the
people
who live in them, but corporate conspiracy is a lot handier
when you've got a self-aware, local culture to promote.

But an even bigger schism is forming.
When those secret thirteen year-old girls get
off work, they have another big problem: no computers
or cell phones back at the hovel. "The world," it
turns out, "is fast developing into two distinct
civilizations  those living inside
the electronic gates of cyberspace and those
living on the outside." It's a shame the cyberspace
access gap is creating a rift between the
formerly close cultures of the first and third worlds,
yes?

If Jeremy Rifkin has a sturm-und-drang addiction that
muddies the impact of his work, David Brooks has what
you might generously call the opposite problem. The
Weekly Standard writer's weirdly celebrated
Bobos in Paradise is glib to the point of
vanishing, a cute little essay hooked up to a tire
pump and sold as a book of acute, if genial, social
observation. Needless to say, it received exactly 2.3 trillion
times the amount of attention Rifkin's book got.
Brooks seems to notice primarily that
Bobos  bourgeois
bohemians, or upper middle-class
professionals who adopt a posture of notional
counterculturalism  spend a lot of money on their
kitchens, a fact he chortles on about approximately
forever. "No more flimsy cooking cans with glorified
Bunsen burners on top for today's domestic
enthusiasts," Brooks writes. "Today's gourmet Bobos
want a 48-inch-wide, six-burner, dual-fuel, 20,000 Btu
range that sends up heat like a space shuttle rocket
booster turned upside down. Furthermore, they want
cool gizmos, like a lava-rock grill, a 30,000 Btu wok
burner, brass burner igniters (only philistines have
aluminum ones), and a half-inch-thick steel griddle.
They want an oven capacity of 8 cubic feet..." And so
on. And then there's an additional long paragraph of
description about the kind of refrigerator these nutty
people use, before the whole kitchen theme reappears
nearly 200 pages later in a funny vignette in
which a fictional composite of a Bobo actually
walks around in her kitchen. "The Bobo glances
at the wooden ladles she has been collecting. She is
taken by their slender curves, and prizes them more
than any other object she has harvested during her
counter-connoisseur browsings...." Alright, already,
now how do we get all this stuff? We'll take Jim J. Bullock
to block.

But the most interesting thing about Bobos in
Paradise is the way it reads alongside its
neighbors on the current affairs shelf. Rifkin recites
the phone book, in stentorian tones, to prove that
community has faltered; we fell asleep next to the
warm and cozy bodies of our neighbors, and woke up
next to a big corporation that keeps trying to pretend
it's the same old folks next door. "When all forms of
communication become commodities," Rifkin writes,
"then culture, the stuff of communications, inevitably
becomes a commodity as well. And that's what's
happening."
Other
writers follow different paths to the same fear:
Community is suffocating, and the social isolation of
a media-saturated, commercially driven world is
depriving it of air.

David Brooks, meanwhile, gets mileage out of the way
everybody's all into this
community stuff
these days, even if it tends to be a faked-out version
of community. Bobos, he argues, are drawn to  and are
creating  a nationwide series of "Latte towns" where
people "stroll down the pedestrian mall" and the
"local businessmen gather for breakfast every
morning." Latte towns have all kinds of
" arts councils,
school-to-work collaboratives, environmental groups,
preservation groups, community-supported agriculture,
antidevelopment groups, and ad hoc activist groups...
People in these places apparently would rather spend
less time in the private sphere of their home and
their one-acre yard and more time in their common
areas."

The writer of big ideas, of course, would rather spend
more time in the common area of
trendspotting
and
cele
brity interviews; and in a
world in which young people no longer have sex,
homosexuality has vanished, and marriage is
magnificently stable, that lifestyle is more attractive than ever.
But as we calculate the odds that
either the boojwah smart-aleck or the aging
entropist
will prove correct in his predictions, we can't help thinking
that the real trend in society is an update of that
old Goldmanism:
Nobody knows anything,
but some people know more about it than others.